Artifacts

• The human world consists of artifacts: things that were made by humans and meant to exist apart from us so they can persist after we’re gone. For example, a memory in my mind is not an artifact, but a memoir in which I wrote my memories is an artifact. As for other examples, just look at the world around you and you’ll see millions of artifacts from houses to roads and cars, parks, pencils, desks, governments, works of art, books, and I could go on, listing practically every noun in the dictionary.

• Artifacts exist on their own, but they also exist in relationship with other artifacts. The process of arranging artifacts in specific relationships is called Design. A house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright uses the same artifacts (concrete, steel, dimensional lumber) as a house designed by your local contractor, but the quality of the two houses may be very different. As a designed collection of artifacts, each house also becomes an artifact of it’s own. In the same way, we combine simple machine artifacts like pulleys and gears to construct more complicated machine artifacts.

• It’s not just physical objects that are artifacts. If we write down a set of rules for how we do things, those instructions represent an artifact as well. In a simple example, the rules of a card game are the only thing about that game that exists apart from the people who play it, but games like poker are very much human artifacts. Writ large, the same thing is true of the United States government. It was established by our Constitution which is essentially a set of rules, and while there are now plenty of physical buildings and objects created to carry out those instructions, the Constitution remains the basis of the U.S. government.

• Given that the human world consists of artifacts, there are three ways to try to improve things: we can make the artifacts work better, we can set rules about using the existing artifacts, and we can try to persuade people to use the artifacts in some optimal way. Political change is about setting new rules or changing existing rules (“It is now against the law to chew pencils”). Sometimes, education is about convincing people to use artifacts properly (“Don’t chew your pencil; it isn’t ladylike”). And design is about making a better artifact that spontaneously affects how it’s used (“Ew, this pencil tastes awful, so I no longer want to chew it”).

• All human artifacts are systems, ranging in complexity from very simple to highly complex. By calling an artifact a system we’re acknowledging that the different parts of the system (the different artifacts that make up the larger artifact) interact in important ways. One of the ways that we can improve an artifact is to find changes we can make to one of the parts that will change how the overall artifact operates. We can also introduce new artifacts that affect the overall system.

“When humans have vital need of reaching the other side of a roaring river’s rapids, if I design and produce a bridge to the other side, I am sure they will use it spontaneously instead of risking their lives in trying to swim across.” — Buckminster Fuller, Letter to Mr. Westrots, Cleveland, OH, 30 Apr 1974 (cited in Synergetics Dictionary, v. 1, p. 92)

“Design science undertakes a functional solution of problems. The methodology is First: What is the problem to be solved? And Second: How can that be solved by artifacts rather than by political contriving, or persuasion, or reorganization of the the present situation. So I always go to the artifact. […] Artifacts induce their spontaneous use. By virtue of their spontaneous use the pattern of society changes, the problem is solved, and the previous situation becomes obsolete.” — RBF, tape transcript RBF to W. Wolf, 15 Jun 1974 (cited in Synergetics Dictionary, v. 1, p. 92)

Therefore: